Not Dark Yet the Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon Photography

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25 Years of the Brown Sisters and New Work, photographs by Nicholas Nixon. Begun in 1975, Nixon's annual group portraits of the artist's wife Bebe and her three sisters comprise his most well-known series. Collectively, they represent a distinct take on the tradition of portraiture for their rigorous simplicity in mode of conception and overall romantic beauty. Through this picture-history of the four Brown siblings, Nixon chronicles, almost methodically, slivers in time of the dramatic, ever-changing aging process by way of which familiarity and permanence may also be found.

For this ongoing series, the artist adheres to two unwavering constants. First, the sisters always pose in the same frontal sequence; Laurie, Heather, Bebe, and Mimi. Second, regardless of how many negatives exposed, only one is selected for printing from each individual year's batch. This imparts a scientific approach to the work, with its unchanging variables, setting parameters for the creative process. However, operating within these limits also allows the subject matter to richly expand, allowing the viewer to partake more empathetically in the lives of the four individuals. Through Nixon's photographs, we have grown into refined adulthood with the Brown sisters. Also showing for the first time in this exhibition is a new body of vertical photographs, a format only recently adopted with his last exhibition at Zabriskie, Family Pictures: Then and Now. They continue in a documentary vein epitomized by Nixon, an aesthetic characterized by its spontaneously cropped, revealing sensitivity and frankness, without being overly sentimental. The subject of these new 8" x 10" contact prints include people in contemplation, play and embrace, landscapes resembling color-field paintings, and a dog.

Over the last twenty-five years, Nixon has pursued series documenting cities, people on porches, old people, visiting nurses, people with AIDS, a school for the blind, public schools, self-portraiture, and his own children, Sam and Clementine. Most of these projects have documented change over time in the lives of their subjects, and together they have described people of all ages.

Born in 1947 in Detroit, MI, Nicholas Nixon first gained national attention in the 1975 George Eastman House exhibition New Topographics, and has had solo exhibitions since then at major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago (1985), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1989), and the Museum of Modern Art (1976 and 1988), which organized his mid-career retrospective, Pictures of People. He has received three NEA Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Nixon's work has appeared in Zabriskie group shows sinceTen Contemporary American Photographers at Galerie Zabriskie Paris in 1977. This is his seventh one-man show at Zabriskie. 

Nicholas Nixon--The Brown Sisters from Fraenkel Gallery on Vimeo.

Time is running away ... , see also Shooting Gallery In Almost Every Picture Erik Kessels Photography ...